By 26 November, Sir Gilbert Elliot knew all about the prince’s plan. ‘He is, I believe, pretty sick of his long confinement at Windsor, and it is very natural that he should be so, for besides the scene before him, he has been under greater restraint in his behaviour and way of life than he has ever known since he was his own master.’105 It was said the doctors had agreed to it as they hoped, once returned nearer to London, to resume some of their regular practices there. In fact, the move was, on one level at least, designed to improve conditions for the king. At Kew, where the gardens were extensive and enclosed, he could take more exercise than was possible in the exposed terraces and parks of Windsor. But, as the prince himself explained to the king’s attendants, greater privacy would also permit the adoption of more punitive measures: ‘sad necessity … obliged the faculty to declare that they found that lenient measures increased the malady, and that they had determined among more coercive ones’.106
For some weeks, even those most sympathetic to the king’s predicament had been asking for the implementation of a firmer regime; at Kew, such a policy would be far less visible. Everyone knew there was little chance that George would go willingly. He was deeply attached to the life he had built for himself at Windsor, regarding the place as a symbol of everything he had striven to create over the years; a manifestation of both dynastic continuity and family stability. It was where he felt most rooted and at ease; it was, more than anywhere else, his home. Although he had been happy at Kew, it did not have for him the deeper meaning and resonance of Windsor. His extreme reluctance to be taken there also owed as much to the way the decision was made as to the destination itself. George had spent all his adult life in absolute charge of his personal destiny. It had been nearly thirty years since anyone had overruled or contradicted his wishes. Now, all his accustomed self-determination had been peremptorily removed. He was not consulted about his removal, and his known hostility to the idea was disregarded. There could have been no clearer demonstration of the degree to which power had deserted him. It was hardly surprising that the first coercive measures used against the king would be those employed to ensure that he went at all.
When Colonel Digby told Fanny Burney what was intended, her immediate response was that the king ‘will never consent to quit Windsor’, though she suspected that, in the end, the alliance between the doctors and the Prince of Wales would be too powerful to be resisted.107 The queen, too, was deeply apprehensive about the scheme. She knew the king did not want to go, and agreed to it only ‘with the extremest reluctance’.108 The prince had persuaded Pitt, the Lord Chancellor and the Cabinet that the move to Kew was a necessary one. Despite her misgivings, Charlotte did not resist what now seemed inevitable. It was unthinkable, however, that she would not accompany her husband. Mrs Harcourt, who wondered if she should not have shown a little more backbone, believed she would stand firm on that, at least. ‘I shall be surprised if she does not insist on going with him; if she suffers herself to be parted from him, he is lost forever, but at such an important moment I hope she will act with spirit.’109 When the prince did indeed suggest that his mother remain at Windsor while her husband went to Kew, the queen gathered up enough remnants of her dignity to refuse point-blank: ‘Prince of Wales, do it at your peril; where the king is, there shall I be.’110
On the day appointed for the move – 29 November – the queen’s courage faltered. ‘Her mind now quite misgave her about Kew; the king’s dislike was terrible to think of, and she could not foresee in what way it might end.’ The plan was that she and her daughters should leave Windsor first, ‘and then the king should be told that they were gone, which was the sole method they could devise to prevail with him to follow. He was then to be allured by the promise of seeing them at Kew.’111 The queen and the princesses did as they were ordered, although in tears and with a mounting sense of disquiet. Once at Kew, ‘the suspense with which the king was awaited [was] truly dreadful’. The queen had decided to return that night if he did not appear, and, as a result, no one was allowed to unpack. Meanwhile, back at Windsor, ‘in what confusion was the house! Princes, equerries, physicians, pages – all conferring, whispering, plotting and caballing how to get the king to set off.’112
Things went quite as badly on the journey as Greville had expected. ‘The king most stoutly objected to every hint for his removal, and would not get up.’113 In the face of his refusal to cooperate, it was eventually decided to send for the first minister. ‘Accordingly, Mr Pitt went in and, telling the king that it was a fine day, asked him if he would not get up and set off to Kew where the queen had gone.’ Just as Charlotte had feared, the king did not take this news well. ‘The king objected, and said the queen had gone without leave, and that she should return to supplicate his pardon.’ George was resistant to all inducements, attempting, as he always did, ‘to make terms’, agreeing to go only if he could travel in his own coach or with the Princess Royal. ‘Mr Pitt, baffled in his endeavours, left the apartment and the king continued in bed.’ When Greville and General Harcourt came to talk to him, ‘he became very angry, and hastily closed the bed-curtains and hid himself from us’. Later, he showed the equerries letters which they thought he had written to request a military force to rescue him. Finally, the physicians marched into his room in a phalanx, told him he must go and that ‘if he continued his refusal longer, he would be forced’. Eventually, he asked if Greville and General Harcourt would accompany him, and on their agreeing, ‘he rose and dressed’.114
Having at last got on their way, at Datchet Bridge on the Thames ‘twenty loyal tradesmen appeared. As the king’s carriage drove by them, they bowed respectfully and took a melancholy leave.’ Seeing them, the king ‘felt the greatest emotion’ which Greville had seen him display so far. ‘The “big tear” started in his eye, and putting his hand before his face, he said with much feeling, “These good people are too fond of me,” and then added with an affecting sensibility, “Why am I taken from the place I like best in the world?”’ When they passed through Brentford, ‘a drunken man halloed out as the carriage passed. The king mistook this, and thinking the shout was intended against him, said that they often hissed him as he passed this town.’115 Soon the gates of Kew appeared; once inside, the king was not to be seen again for four months.
*
If George’s condition had been bad at Windsor, at Kew it soon became far worse. During his confinement there, the extremity of the king’s behaviour exposed all the fracture lines in his family that decorum, discipline and distance usually concealed. Without the iron certainty of his will, the centre did not – perhaps could not – hold. Relations between mother and son, husband and wife, daughters and parents, all were subjected to excruciating and unprecedented strain; and none of them, including the king himself, ended the period quite as they had begun it.
The king’s arrival at Kew was even more disturbing than his departure from Windsor. He left his carriage with his usual dignity, but on entering the house, ‘making a run, he attempted to go into the suite of apartments on the left. His intentions were baffled on finding the door locked, and he evidently showed much disappointment. He had expected to find the queen and his family at dinner in those apartments.’116 Instead he was ushered into a series of rooms on the right. The king considered, with some justification, he had been tricked. He had been told that if he went to Kew, he would see his family, but they were no more visible here than they had been at Windsor. He blamed the queen, declaring that she had betrayed him. Perhaps as a result, Greville thought the king had become, if possible, even more manic in his behaviour. ‘He told us that though a bed had been prepared for him, he would not go to bed, and dwelt on his firm intention to tire out his attendants. He remarked that he was very strong and active, and in proof of this, he danced and hopped with more agility than I suspected could have been in him.’ Greville could hardly bear to watch. ‘The light of such an exhibition in our dear king, and so much unlike himself, affected me most painful
ly.’117
On 1 December, he was no better. Greville also noticed a new and worrying addition to the king’s repertoire of problems. ‘In his conversation, oaths, which had never yet been heard from his lips, now for the first time were blended not infrequently with indecencies.’118 On the following day, he descended to a new depth of misery. ‘So much was he depressed in thought, that he even gave hints of being tired of his existence, and actually entreated his pages to despatch him.’ There was still the occasional lucid interval. ‘When more composed, the king resorted to an occupation not uninteresting to him in settled days. He drew plans of the house, and sketched alterations in it; this he did with tolerable accuracy.’ In moments like this, Greville was sure the king was aware of his situation. ‘An observation dropped from him this morning, which marked the sense he had of his misfortune pretty strongly. Having drawn a line pretty firmly and straight, he approved, by saying to a page, “Pretty well for a man who is mad.”’ But later in the same day, ‘he was mischievously jocose, and at which time, burnt two wigs belonging to his pages. At another, he was childishly playful, begging romps and making his pages wheel him around the room.’ All talk of lasting ‘amendment’ had long disappeared.119
Elsewhere in the house, silent misery prevailed. The queen, princesses and their attendants were established in a suite on the first floor, where Princess Augusta camped out on a small bed placed in her mother’s room. Clearly Charlotte was still terrified of being ‘broken in upon’ again. The other princesses and their much-reduced household were distributed along a maze of dark passages, their names chalked on the doors by the Prince of Wales, who had personally allocated everyone’s rooms. They were not immediately above the king – everything there had been shut up lest he ‘be tantalised by footsteps overhead’ – but near enough to be aware of what went on downstairs. On the first night at Kew, Fanny Burney could not sleep. ‘I thought I heard the poor king … his indignant disappointment haunts me. The queen too was very angry at having had promises made in her name which could not be kept.’120 Like her husband, Charlotte ‘had passed a wretched night and already lamented leaving Windsor’.
The house itself was extremely uncomfortable. It was rarely used as a winter residence, and was cold, draughty and not very clean. ‘The parlours were without fires and washing,’ noted Fanny as she crept along the frozen corridors. Colonel Digby ordered carpets to be installed in the princesses’ rooms, at his own expense, so cheerless did their surroundings appear. Without Digby’s initiative, nothing would have been done. ‘So miserable is the house at present that no general orders to the proper people are ever given or thought about … everyone is absorbed in the calamity.’ Digby also planned to supply the princesses ‘with sandbags for windows and doors, which he intended to bring and place himself. The wind which blew against these lovely princesses, he declared, was enough to destroy them.’121
The queen’s spirits, low enough already, can hardly have been improved by such oppressively spartan conditions. As her husband grew worse, she knew a decision had to be made about his treatment, which she could neither avoid nor devolve to anyone else. Fanny wrote that ‘The length of the malady so uncertain, the steps which now seemed requisite so shocking; for new advice, and such as only suited disorders that physicians in general relinquish, was now proposed, and compliance or refusal were almost equally tremendous.’122 Hidden in Fanny’s deliberately elusive prose is a reluctant acknowledgement that the king’s illness was now considered by all those around him to be madness – and that the summoning of specialist help could not much longer be avoided.
It came in the form of seventy-year-old Francis Willis, a clergyman who had qualified as a physician, together with his sons John, Thomas and Robert Darling Willis. Early in his medical career, Francis had decided to devote himself to the treatment of madness and, with the help of his sons, established a highly regarded private asylum at Greatford in his native Lincolnshire. He had treated Lady Harcourt’s mother, and it was probably on her recommendation that he was invited to attend the king. Almost from the moment they arrived, the Willises and their methods created controversy. Dr Willis ‘is considered by some as not much better than a mountebank,’ sniffed Lord Sheffield, ‘and not far different from those who are confined in his house. That such a man should be called in … has caused some jealousy; but the opinions of the physicians are not much respected.’123
Certainly Francis Willis did not inspire much regard among ‘the medical tribe’ already established around the king. He was an unpolished, unsophisticated man, with no experience of courts. Unlike the other doctors, he was not a member of the Royal College of Physicians. Warren declared that he did not consider him ‘in the light of a physician’ at all, although he quickly delegated to Willis the difficult and exhausting task of the daily management of the king. ‘I took the liberty of speaking to him with some degree of authority,’ Warren admitted; he clearly thought of Willis as a man of little intellectual or professional expertise, to be kept totally under his command. When, in response to the clamour for information about the king’s state, regular medical bulletins were at last issued by the physicians, Warren ensured that Willis was not allowed to sign them until instructed by the Lord Chancellor to let him add his name to the others. Teased and patronised by everyone around him, including his patient, Willis was an outsider, never treated as a medical or a social equal by those compelled to act as his colleagues. None of this seems to have mattered much to him. He was sure that he could cure the king where everyone else had failed, and it was this unshakeable certainty that kept him buoyant in the face of all disappointments.
The queen had initially been very reluctant to agree to the summoning of Willis, as it was ‘a measure which seemed to fix the nature of the king’s attack in the face of the world; but necessity and strong advice had prevailed over her repugnance’.124 George shared his wife’s sense of shame, telling one of his pages that, ‘as Dr Willis was now come, he could never more show his face again in this country and that he would leave it forever and retire to Hanover’. His first meeting with Willis, on 5 December, had not gone well. Although George received him ‘with composure … and seemed very anxious to state to him that he had been ill but was now quite well again’, his dislike of doctors soon triumphed over his initial politeness. He observed that Willis’s dress ‘bespeaks you of the Church, do you belong to it?’ Willis said that he ‘did formerly, but lately I have attended chiefly to physic’. ‘I am sorry for it,’ answered the king, ‘for you have quitted a profession I have always loved, and you have embraced one I most heartily detest. Alter your line of life, ask what preferment you want and make me your friend. I recommend you Worcester.’125 Willis had gamely attempted to defend himself. ‘Sir, our saviour himself went about healing the sick.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ replied the king, ‘but he had not £700 a year for it.’126
In the evening of his first day at Kew, Willis returned to the king’s room and demonstrated the techniques he was to employ in treating his patient. He later explained to Greville that ‘he “broke in” patients, “like horses in a manège”, as his expression was’.127 Like his colleagues, Willis believed that the king would only improve when he was able to control himself and act calmly; but Willis was convinced measured behaviour did not just emerge from within – it could be imposed from without. A patient could be compelled into calmness by the authority of another – especially if that other was himself. Willis took pride in his ability to quell all forms of dissension by the sheer force of his gaze. For all his apparent simplicity, he was not easily intimidated. When he was examined by a parliamentary committee investigating the king’s condition, he made short work of the celebrated politician and fiery orator Edmund Burke – by any standards no flinching spirit. Willis told Lady Harcourt that Burke had asked him ‘what methods he used to subdue the king when he was outrageous. Willis answered, “I do it by my eye”, and at the same time, darted such a look at his antagonist as made him shrink into hi
mself and stopped his questions for that time.’128
The king began their meeting with ‘much inconsistency and too much eagerness. He again launched out in strong invective against his physicians, and abused the profession.’ Willis was unperturbed, raising his voice when the king raised his, never wavering or retreating. ‘The king became violently enraged, rushed in great agitation against Dr Willis, with both hands, intending to push him away but not to strike him.’ Unmoved, Willis told him ‘he must control himself, or he would put him in a strait waistcoat. On this hint, Dr Willis went out of the room and returned with one in his hand … It was in a paper and he held it directly under his arm. The king eyed it attentively, and, alarmed at the doctor’s firmness of voice and procedure, began to submit. He promised to go to bed, and with difficulty, went to the next apartment and undressed.’ For Greville, this was the moment he had long hoped for. ‘It was immediately necessary to have this struggle. He seized the opportunity with judgement and conducted himself throughout the interview with wonderful management and force.’ For the first time, Greville allowed himself a glimpse of hope: ‘This seems to have been the first solid step leading to permanent recovery that has taken place as yet.’129
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